About the Project
MANIFEST is a facility multi-object fibre positioning system for the Giant Magellan Telescope. MANIFEST will consist of hundreds of high precision robots (called “Starbugs”) that patrol the telescope field of view and feed celestial light into currently planned optical spectrographs (the high resolution GCLEF and the medium resolution GMACS) and future infrared spectrographs. MANIFEST will have multiple fibre configurations, ranging from single fibres to multiple integral-field-units to single integral-field-units.
The Starbug technology underpinning MANIFEST uses piezoceramic actuators operating in closed loop via a fixed metrology camera bank to obtain 20 micron precision over the full metre-scale field-of-view of the telescope. This technology has been developed at the AAO over the last decade and was prototyped on-sky with the TAIPAN technology demonstrator on the UK Schmidt Telescope.